Olivia Burrows Sutherland gave up teaching to follow her own wedding playbook – now the rich and famous pay her to go viral on their big day.
This story appears in Issue 17 of Forbes Australia – out Monday. Tap here to secure your copy.
Olivia Burrows Sutherland is sitting across from billionaire Ankur Jain, telling him he just has to trust her.
The 30-year-old who not long ago was a high school teacher in Melbourne is telling the 34-year-old founder of Bilt – valued by Forbes at US$1.2 billion – how the business rolls.
“And I tell him, ‘Ankur, this will work. We’re going to have so much fun. It’s going to go viral but we have to do it this way,’” Burrows Sutherland tells Forbes Australia. “He said, ‘alright, I trust you.’ And that was a defining moment in my career to have someone of that calibre put such faith in me. Pressure was on, obviously.”
The plan was never to go viral with every single post, she reminds him. She’s hoping to minimise the hate and maximise the love that will come to Jain and his bride, Erika Hammond, when she puts their wedding on socials.
Weddings – especially crazy-rich weddings – generate excesses of both, Burrows Sutherland knows.
So, she lays a foundation with more gentle, get-to-know-you content over the first six days of the week-long wedding. There will be time to unleash a pandemic’s worth of virulence, Burrows Sutherland tells Jain.
There’s nothing the Melbourne wedding content creator loves more than going viral.
For Burrows Sutherland, it has been a short climb to the top of the wedding-content-creator mountain. Armed with only an iPhone, some nice frocks and an idea, she’s gone from a teacher to an industry disruptor who’s got behind the scenes at weddings ranging from Forbes Australia’s 30 under 30 alumni Tammy Hembrow, to European royalty and sports stars. She can make more now from a single wedding than she used to make in a year at the blackboard.
The viral pivot
Burrows Sutherland studied arts and commerce at university and had an interest in dance, literature, and marketing. That landed her the teaching job with an even more mixed school bag of subjects, while moonlighting in e-commerce with a skincare brand.
She got on TikTok in 2019, in time to have her head wrapped around the nuances of the app by the time COVID-19 struck in 2020.
“We’re going to go viral. Let’s minimise the negativity that can come out of this.”
Olivia Burrows Sutherland
“I had a lot of small business owners reach out to me and ask me to help with their TikTok strategy. So I was helping them through that. Then as TikTok grew, so did my knowledge and my mentoring.”
She launched a marketing consultancy, Olivia and Living. But her own wedding changed everything.
“I knew how important it is to have a personal brand, as a business owner … I was fortunate to have bridesmaids who loved behind-the-scenes TikTok content. I put together what I had, and it did really well on social media.
“The wedding garnered millions of views; it went viral very quickly worldwide, and I received hundreds of messages from brides, and grooms, saying, ‘Can you please come to our wedding and do exactly what you’ve done and capture all the behind-the-scenes?’”
She was torn. She’d just launched the marketing consultancy, determined to keep it premium. How would it look if people saw her as just this random person turning up at weddings?
But when she thought about her own nuptials, as much as she’d loved the work of the videographer and photographer, she’d noticed that when she came to look back at that happy day, it was the behind-the-scenes TikToks she went for.
Burrows Sutherland explains that while videographers and photographers often shared a little behind-the-scenes content, no one was doing it as their sole focus. “That didn’t exist when I got married. It was becoming a conversation overseas, but no one had taken it to a luxury market and branded it in a luxury way, so where you didn’t feel like a bit of a random person following the couple around with an iPhone.
“It’s an assigned professional, titled ‘wedding content creator’. They come with just an iPhone purely to capture the behind-the-scenes. They understand how iPhone settings work, how to edit it in a way that will perform on social media.
“I knew it was a great business opportunity if I could just nail the branding. The branding has to align with the consultancy component. So, I worked on that. It was a very controversial topic within the industry, coming in with an iPhone.
“That was how we disrupted the industry – taking a straightforward concept and branding it to the point where we now do multi-million-dollar weddings.”
“The wedding of the century”
One enquiry came from an American who was having a seven-day wedding in Paris: lunch at Chanel, the bridal party staying in the Palace of Versailles, and a rehearsal at the Palais Garnier opera house. “I can’t say how much they spent, but it was close to a nine-figure wedding,” says Burrows Sutherland.
“She wanted a full social media strategy. So part of our LuxLux package is social media planning and management. We take over their socials. They’ve got seven days of events, but they want to keep up with the posting rapidly. They can’t be bothered doing captions.”
From that, she secured Jain and his eight-day wedding to Hammond, a former WWE wrestler and personal trainer. Burrows Sutherland followed the wedding party on safari in South Africa, posting each day, before the party jetted off to Cairo.
“They had the full social media package. I implemented the strategy that we would post one video daily. I was aware that when we posted the wedding day at the pyramids, you’ll get a lot of discourse online.
“I told them that in the lead-up, we need to showcase your personalities and just have what you’re doing secondary in the video. So, rather than just focusing on these big, extravagant safari-themed parties, it will be about you, your conversations, your friendships, and your family. “Every second day, we did video focused on fashion, beauty, and more of the bride’s styling. On the wedding day, I aimed to make it go as viral as possible. They didn’t necessarily have that as a goal, but he’s an entrepreneur and he said, ‘Let’s just have fun with it.’
“Fun for me is going viral. And he knew that. I explained that, ‘We’re going to go viral. Let’s minimise the negativity that can come out of this.’
“They are the most charismatic people. It’s easy to love them through a screen.” Halfway through, when he asked how they were trending, she had to remind him of the plan to showcase their personalities and get people excited.
It worked, Burrows Sutherland’s content of the wedding in front of the pyramids and sphinx, is an extraordinary insight into how the other half of .01 per cent live. Her video, tightly edited on CapCut, went “megaviral” with more than 100 million views.
Jain was happy that his company, Bilt Rewards, a points business for home renters, got the exposure. As did Olivia and Living. “If you say ‘the Egypt wedding’ to anyone in the industry, they will know it. I meet people, and they straight away say, ‘You did the Egypt wedding.’
“But, something I don’t tend to speak about – because in a creative world your work should speak for itself – but the two months we spent at the very beginning strategising and branding it in such a luxurious way is the reason we were able to grow so quickly. I didn’t know the clientele we have now even existed back then, but I knew I wanted to be at that level. I knew there was something more than local weddings, which we still love doing, but our ultimate goal was to do weddings that had never been seen before.”
“You enter a space where money is no object – that space does exist and is reachable with the right marketing.”
Olivia Burrows Sutherland
The ones she can name
Olivia Burrows Sutherland claims royalty and high-profile celebrities in her client list, but is bound by non-disclosure agreements with many of them, she says. There are, however, some nuptials she can disclose:
- Forbes Australia’s 30 Under 30 listee Tammy Hembrow and Love Island alumni Matt Zukowsi in Byron Bay.
- Pro soccer player Riyad Mahrez and reality TV star Taylor Ward’s 3-day event in Lake Como, Italy.
- Payments multi-millionaire Chris Sidhom and Nardin Botros, also a three-day affair in Lake Como.
- Daughter of millionaire car salesman Bob Brockway, Madeleine Brockway and Jacob LaGrone, in the seven-day, so-called “wedding of the century” at a castle outside Paris.
- Daughter of Australian miner and politician Clive Palmer, Emily Palmer’s private ceremony on Lake Como.
- Ankur Jain (Forbes US Cover CEO) & Erika Hammond and their 8-day wedding from South Africa to Egypt:
- And she has Cleveland Browns quarterback Deshaun Watson and Jilly Anais, an entrepreneur and celebrity, coming up.
